It seems to me that as time goes on, and we advance from Windows XP to 7 to 8.1, two things are happening at the same time:[ul][li]Advances in hardware allow us to get monitors which are larger and larger, for the same money or even less.[/li][li]The default settings on many programs are to hide more and more of the features, such as menus bars and such.[/ul][/li]This is GQ, and this thread must not be a place to complain, and I really don’t want to complain. I am asking for factual information. Namely: Why do the software designers think that the average person wants these features to be hidden? Especially now that we have gigantic screens! Why can’t they spare a half-inch to show these things by default?
I can easily understand that some people want to use every possible pixel for their content, but that option has always been there anyway. (Example: View/FullScreen in Word 2002, or F11 in Firefox 37) And besides, if the menu bar is shown by default, it becomes very easy for someone to use the menu bar to hide it. But when it is hidden by default, the only way to turn it on is to ask a friend or find a website which can show you how.
So, to repeat my question for factual information: What is the advantage of setting the default value to “hide”?
I don’t have any inside information on this issue, but I think that it’s due to a a desire for software that appears current and fresh among software designers, software reviewers and the general public. It’s just a general fashion trend, the same way bell bottom jeans aren’t popular anymore even though they aren’t worse in any material sense than what exists now. I’d give a root cause of this trend in software designing as the rise of Apple products from a fringe luxury product to the mainstream. Apple’s software has always generally been known as fairly clean and bland (cf. Mac OS X 10.4, released in 2005), and and when Apple became the market leader, everyone else started following their lead.
I’m not sure there is any singular ethic, but it seems to me that the stuff around the content has grown fatter in recent years. Windows 7 (or was it Vista) brought us fat window borders and a thick title bar (I think just so we couldnt fail to notice the Aero transparency), Office 2007 brought us the ribbon menu that takes up a huge strip of valuable screen space…
Scrolling the page is wasted time, just like switching tasks/windows is wasted time. It’s acceptable in places like configuration screens that you only visit a few times, but for the main productive space, clearing away the clutter is not unsensible. It’s what you do in the kitchen and the workshop, so why not on the computer screen?
